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What Are Computers (If They’re not Thinking Things)?

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How the World Computes (CiE 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 7318))

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Abstract

Many of us now imagine that in the future humans either will, or at least could, ‘in theory’, construct an electronic digital computer which would really be a thinking thing. Alan Turing was one of the first and surely the most notable exponent of this view, and a significant proportion of his published work was devoted to arguing for it.

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References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, The University of Reading, Whiteknights, P.O. Box 217, Reading, Berkshire, RG6 6AH, United Kingdom

    John Preston

Authors
  1. John Preston
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mathematics, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT, Leeds, UK

    S. Barry Cooper

  2. Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Willialm Gates Building, J.J. Thomson Avenue, CB3 0FD, Cambridge, UK

    Anuj Dawar

  3. Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, 1090 GE, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Benedikt Löwe

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Preston, J. (2012). What Are Computers (If They’re not Thinking Things)?. In: Cooper, S.B., Dawar, A., Löwe, B. (eds) How the World Computes. CiE 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7318. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30870-3_61

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30870-3_61

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-30869-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-30870-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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